


A tent for your life

by rieieri



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Post-Half-Blood Prince AU, Second War with Voldemort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 20:03:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9400937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rieieri/pseuds/rieieri
Summary: You can find a lot of things in a tent: first of all the hope.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Here I am with an angst-but-romantic story! 
> 
> A very big thanks to my beta, the nice **StopTalkingAtMe**. Really, thank you dear!
> 
> Enjoy the story! :D

** A tent for your life **

 

 

The Muggle tent where you’re trapped is small, stinks of cat piss and, judging by the tattered nylon, has seen better days. It’s claustrophobic, dirty and a gust of wind could sweep it away but, for now, it’s your home. Yours and Potter’s.  
  
You started living together five months ago, even if it seems like longer. In that period the Dark Lord has been claiming victims with the same ruthlessness as a farmer reaping wheat.  
  
Parents started to think that if they were going to die they wanted their children by their side. Hogwarts had to close because there were only orphans and Death Eaters’ sons left to teach, and no one there to teach them. Without the safe haven of the school your parents pushed you into the arms of the Order of the Phoenix, placing you among people who would protect you from the angry backlash if the Dark Lord lost.  
  
It didn’t happen. They died – the Dark Lord took their care as a grave act of infidelity – and you went on the run with Potter. You are still the two most wanted. Potter, a couple of days ago, told you that you should feel honored. You’ve discovered he has a highly -questionable sense of humor.  
  
At first it was difficult to live together in Grimmauld Place, where a big part of the group was composed of Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs, because of how little you trusted one another, but death reconciles everyone in the end. So you both started to appreciate the shades of gray in each other’s character: you know he doesn’t mind your singlemindedness and your self-control and you have admitted to him that, “Your courage is useful but disturbing.” He understood.

  
Then, Kreacher visited dear Aunt Bella and all came crumbling down. You fled like spiders before a basilisk. After that you decided to divide into groups of three or four with different magical capabilities to give the best chance of survival to all of you. You and Potter were with Longbottom and Lovegood in the Muggles’ side of London. You lived in a shack on the periphery, hidden with protective charms, but two passing Death Eaters caught you while you were buying some food certain that nobody could find you. You boys were wrong and Longbottom died.  
  
Two days after that, it was Lovegood’s turn. You were going to a meeting with Granger and Smith’s group and the Death Eaters intercepted you. You can’t strip out her big blue eyes from your head: if before they were distant, in that moment they were totally absent. They saw you, fixed in their blankness, and you couldn’t move your body. Potter took you by an arm and he Disapparated.  
  
When you returned to the flat you gathered your things and you went into hiding. In the first three months, without a roof to shelter you, you were often ill. Then Potter returned from a meeting with Weasley – you were hidden in a telephone box in the middle of London because you had a fever – and he had a tent full of holes which stank of piss. But it was a roof, a safe place.  
  
You’ve spent hours transforming it into something habitable, hours reciting spells to clean and to hide it from prying eyes. And in the end it’s not been so bad.  
  
In the last month, with so many people dead and Potter never there because he had to save the world, you have been left alone with your worries. The tent has become your everything: a home, a family, a friend, a voyeur.  
  
You see this tent and you remember the night when the werewolf died: Potter’s tears and his desperation. You also remember the way you placed your hand on his shoulder and how he rested his head against yours. You remember that half-hug, that far-too-lusty grab and the stink of your dirty bodies. It had been days since you’d been able to have a shower. You also remember how he raised his head, how he roughly pulled your hair, how he kissed you, biting your lips until they bled. You see it and remember all of that night: the violent thrusts of his hips, his hungry kisses and his frenzy which is always there, always there to make you remember that what you were doing was a new way to receive comfort, an escape from the pain and nothing more.

 

Next morning you didn’t talk about it, but it was as if you saw each other for the first time and Potter had murmured something. Then he was gone to a meeting for heroes and you remained in the tent, making healing potions with the few ingredients you had.  
  
It happened many times after that. Each time you swore it was the last but you always found an excuse to indulge: _I need a moment to relax; I’m a teenager full of hormones and I am losing my mind; Tomorrow I may die and this is my last desire._ The last one was the one you preferred. You clung onto it, each time a little tighter, until you were living for those moments when anger and pain suffocated you in a sweet way which twisted your stomach and forced you to ask for more.  
  
Potter noticed you had developed a sort of addiction for those occasional moments and tried, really tried, with punches and kicks to the stomach, to change your mind. But one more time death reconciled you. Harry’s Muggle relatives were killed and unable to control the emotions that rose within him, Potter vented in the only possible method: he pulled himself into you until you consumed yourselves. That night was a delirium, a trip to an unattainable goal. The lines between before and now utterly erased.  
  
Even now, while he hugs you in his sleep, you can’t help hoping that after the war is over things will stay like this: that Potter will still be with you. You don’t want to imagine his death. And even though you don’t want to fight in this war, perhaps you should do it- for what you’ve been building these last months: a friendship, a relationship based on trust and loyalty and perhaps something more.  
  
Hours ago he told you that when you wake up in the morning he won’t be here, that the moment to do the right thing has come. The right thing for all but not for you two. You have no doubt he’ll come home, to this home, which stinks of piss and is full of holes. He’ll came back to pull your hair and to drown all his anger and his sorrow in your body.  
  
It has to be this way because you need to hope in a life which isn’t full of war and death, in a future where you are fighting for both of you. You see a hole in the nylon and hopes, doubts, dreams, anger and fear are pasted there: they patch that hole which many times, during a downpour, has let the rain in. You know that if there is one chance of life it will come here in your tent. Even if it is small and claustrophobic, if it stinks of cat’s piss and a gust of wind could sweep it away.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it! :D


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